Developing Media Literacy Skills to Challenge Television's Portrayal of Older Women

Cohen, Harriet L.

doi:10.1080/03601270290099796

Cited by 35 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…The media is one vehicle for shaping attitudes towards age and ageing, and it has often been blamed for perpetuating ageism and cultural stereotypes about seniors, particularly older women (Carrigan & Szmigin 2002;Cohen 2002). Even then the studies of the media rarely look at ageism.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lonely older people as a problem in society – construction in Finnish media

Uotila¹,

Lumme-Sandt²,

Saarenheimo³

2011

IJAL

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Loneliness is a prevalent stereotype of old age but there is a lack of studies of how it is represented in mass media. This study examines how the loneliness of older people is portrayed in mass media. The research material consists of 154 texts from the leading 50' magazines and daily newspapers in Finland. In the texts, loneliness was rarely seen solely as a lack of companionship and many negative attributes were connected to it. Among other things, loneliness was connected to the low status of older people in society, inhumane practices in elderly care, lack of meaning in life and neglect by relatives. Loneliness was also viewed as an inevitable part of ageing. However, many suggestions were made to alleviate loneliness. The extent of these suggestions varied from broad and collective actions to simple and perfunctory solutions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lonely older people as a problem in society – construction in Finnish media

Uotila¹,

Lumme-Sandt²,

Saarenheimo³

2011

IJAL

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“…This typically requires an experimental design. However, assessments of how media literacy skills influence media effects also occur through correlational studies (Nathanson, 1999), focus groups (Cohen, 2002), qualitative interviews (Moore, DeChillo, Nicholson, Genovese, & Sladen, 2000), and participant observations (Bragg, 2002).…”

Section: Constructed Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The State of Media Literacy

Potter

2010

Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media

303

157

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Media literacy is a term that means many different things to different peoplescholars, educators, citizen activists, and the general public. This article reviews the variety of definitions and presents a synthesis of commonalities that most definitions of media literacy share. The review presents an overview of how media literacy has been treated as an issue in curriculum design within the institution of education, and then how it has been treated as an intervention by parents and researchers.A relatively new topic, media literacy is popular not just among media scholars but among the general public of educators, consumer activists, and parents concerned about their children's risk of media exposures. ''Media literacy'' as a keyword in a Google search yields 765,000 hits, and using that same keyword in a narrower search within Google Scholar still yields a substantial literature of more than 18,700 articles. These articles were produced by scholars as well as concerned citizens from almost every part of the world. Almost all of the writing about media literacy was published in the past three decades. With mass media changing in the past two decades with digitization of information and convergence across channels of transmission, more scholars were attracted to this topic.The vast size of this fast growing literature and the wide range of backgrounds and interests of the scholars writing about media literacy make it challenging to review the ideas expressed. This state-of-the-scholarship essay focuses on three general issues: definitions, curricula, and interventions. It is more concerned with raising questions than with arguing fordefinitive answers, and it is more divergent in its attraction to many different sub-topics and approaches than it is convergent toward a single definition or set of best practices.

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“…Cohen 2002;Jürgens 1994;Rozanova 2006;Chappell et al 2003). With that in mind, the portrayals of old age that were offered by the news press discourse on population ageing supported -and were supported by -a traditional and well-known strand of 'negative' old age stereotypes and not the ones describing older persons as, for example, healthy and active.…”

Section: Stereotypical Old Age Positionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some studies have found that older people are mainly portrayed as employed, healthy, and socially and physically active characters who enjoy high social prestige (cf. Kessler et al 2004), while others state that the media portray older people by repeatedly pointing out negative traits such as illness as one of the principal characteristics (Cohen 2002;Rozanova 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problematic Demography: Representations of Population Ageing in the Swedish Daily Press

Lundgren

Ljuslinder

2011

Population Ageing

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The ageing of populations has been a topic of discussion during the last few decades, but how is this subject represented in the media, and what images of old age are produced? In this article we present the results of a quantitative content analysis that investigates how the concept of population ageing has been represented in Swedish local and national daily news press between 1988 and 2009, and the old age positions that are offered in these representations. We also use discourse analysis in order to qualitatively examine the ways in which the concept of population ageing is articulated in these news press articles and the old age positions that are thereby constituted. The results show that the concept is constituted as a naturalised expert concept, and is primarily used in order to contextualise articles about future political and economical difficulties or even crises. By articulating population ageing with both political policies, political economy and older people's (as a group) reported need for care and services, population ageing was constituted as a political economic concern rather than a problem for the aged individual.

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Developing Media Literacy Skills to Challenge Television's Portrayal of Older Women

Cited by 35 publications

References 13 publications

Lonely older people as a problem in society – construction in Finnish media

Lonely older people as a problem in society – construction in Finnish media

The State of Media Literacy

Problematic Demography: Representations of Population Ageing in the Swedish Daily Press

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